WAVING REVISITED

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When I began this column almost seven years ago, my first column discussed the act of waving. I described how I had been deeply and unexpectedly touched by the High Plains custom of drivers waving to other drivers. I admitted how it had taken me a bit of time to realize that this included total strangers. I knew this because drivers were waving at me.

At first, I thought this was a case of mistaken identity. I reasoned that no one waved at a stranger, so I must look like someone else. I discarded this assumption in an act of brilliant deduction. Everyone waved at me. It defied logic that everyone could have me confused with someone they knew. Hence, High Plains folks waved at strangers.

Amazing.

I return to the subject of waving because I recently encountered a comment in a book that alluded to it. The book was a piece of fiction, and one of the characters said, “At the time I was in middle America—a place where waving at other people is common—so I didn’t give the wave much thought. It’s not as though it had been an act of recognition.” The character made this comment while relating what had happened as he waited in a train station for someone he barely knew.

This wave doesn’t really play much of a role in the book’s plot. I assume it was used to demonstrate that the character who was speaking was having a hard time finding this other person. It was a means of moving the plot forward without having the character say, “I was really having a hard time finding this other guy.”

FULL DISCLOSURE: Part of an author’s difficulty is trying to figure how much of a plot should be openly disclosed—”I was nervous”—and how much should be inferred—”I went to the bar and ordered a double bourbon, which I swallowed in one long gulp. I ordered another.” If an author uses inference, the author makes the reader think. The literary world likes this. The other side of this issue is represented by a quote from Albert Einstein: Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe.

However, while being nothing more than a literary plot device, this quote says much about the book’s author. His character says, “I was in Middle America—a place where waving at other people is common.”

“Middle America”—he refers to our part of America as though it’s a foreign country, a country where people wave at each other. I don’t know if he discovered this behavior on his own or read it somewhere. Either way, I’d wager that he regarded it as a clever observation tossed into a plot device of minor importance in the overall scheme of his novel.

I know it’s silly, but as I reread this passage, I began to feel angry. With a wave of his pen, this cosmopolitan author had dismissed something I felt was important.

FULL DISCLOSURE: “Wave of his pen” sounds nice, but it’s not very accurate. There are legendary novelists who can only be creative with a fountain pen, and John Updike used an Olivetti MP1 portable typewriter until the day he died, but I’d wager that 5% or less of all authors use something other than a word processing program. I personally have a small collection of fountain pens, my favorite being a 1938 small sized Conway Stewart. But I have abandoned the self-deception that I can use this venerated writing implement for composing even a simple letter. I am hooked on word processing and its ability to edit a document without retyping an entire page, its spelling check, and its ability to shift entire blocks of text in an instant. Eccentric traditionalism is, alas, very inefficient.

I considered writing him and saying, “Look Buddy, waving is the heart and soul of a culture where people care about each other. When you wave at someone, you’re acknowledging that the person exists. You’re offering them your good wishes. With a simple hand gesture, you’re expressing your humanity. Try waving at someone while driving in one of your large cities—your centers of American culture. The only response you’ll get is a one-fingered wave in return or a look of disdain. If you’re really unlucky, you’ll engender an insane act of road rage and end up dodging bullets or trying to avoid an attempt to run you off the road. The next time you write about Middle Americans waving at each other, don’t turn up your nose quite so high. Lament the fact that city dwellers don’t smile at each other, don’t say ‘hello’, and sure as hell don’t wave at each other. If they did, maybe we’d not be stuck as deep as we are in this quagmire of selfishness.”

I didn’t write the author. There was a good chance he would have considered me a crank, an idiot, or both—a cranky idiot. It’s also not fair to attack an author for 14 words in a 400 page novel. It’s possible he waves at folks all the time.